


like a bird in flight

by OpheliaMarina



Category: Twin Peaks
Genre: Canon Compliant, F/F
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-01-04
Updated: 2017-01-04
Packaged: 2018-09-14 19:04:14
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,302
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9198758
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/OpheliaMarina/pseuds/OpheliaMarina
Summary: There was silence for a moment, and Laura kept dangling her leg outward, practicing at its angles- seductive, childish, coquettish, painful. Then she said, “I hate it when you try to understand me.”It was such a Laura thing to say. “Why?”“Because it means you’re trying to think like me, and I don’t want you to think the way I do,” Laura said. “Besides, only people who love you try to understand you.”(a brief and one sided reflection, in three parts)





	

They’re young when Laura gets fixated on mirrors. Twelve, maybe. When Donna tries to remember later how old they had been when Laura started stopping every time her reflection looked back at her, it feels important that they weren’t teenagers yet. Thirteen, in Donna’s mind, is when things started to go really wrong. Maybe for Laura things had been really wrong for the beginning. From being born. But the mirror thing starts when they’re small. 

They seemed to startle Laura, all of a sudden, and when you’re young you’re obtuse to other people’s problems. That’s just the way people are. But Donna has always tuned into Laura, even without trying, always more than other people ever did. If it was Laura, Donna got a sense of it. 

The obsession manifested itself in small ways. She started carrying one of her mom’s empty compacts around with her, everywhere, just to look at her own reflection every hour or so. She wasn’t wearing makeup then, and when she looked at herself she wouldn’t even touch her face. It would just be a minute or so of intense self scrutiny, silent as she regarded herself, and as Donna regarded her, and then she’d snap the thing shut and they’d be on their way again, out of the stillness.

Donna and Laura didn’t talk about it, because it felt better that way. There were a lot of things Donna wanted to ask Laura, even when they were very small, but the mirror fixation wasn’t amongst them. It was okay, though, then, to be young, and have moments where things were left unsaid. Back then it hadn’t bothered her so much.

But it happened in spikes, Laura’s obsessions, and some spikes were higher than others. One time, in Laura’s bedroom, they had been lying across Laura’s bed, upside down and playing cat’s cradle and ignoring their homework, when suddenly Laura stopped, jerked up, and dragged Donna to her dresser to sit her down hard in front of it. It makes her butt smart and her wrist hurt where Laura had grabbed her, and she said, “Hey, what-” and then stopped when she saw the two of them in the glass. Donna, sitting in the chair, looking up at Laura as Laura stares fixedly at herself.

She said, “Laura?”

Laura said, “There’s only one of me, okay?”

Laura was one of those rare people whose voice got higher as they got older. Donna always liked the way her voice sounded low, but not this kind of low- urgent, sad. “I know that.”

“No, it’s just,” Laura said, and then sighed, still staring at herself. “I keep seeing different mes. In dreams, you know? Like, different versions of me, and they’re wrong. But the way they look, it’s…”

With arms still soft with minimal use, Laura turned the vanity chair around, forcibly, on the rug. It squealed and shrieked against the rug and the hardwood beneath it, and Donna clutched the armrests until Laura had turned it the full one-eighty degrees to face her. Then Laura put her effort-red palms over the white-strained knuckles of Donna’s hand, leaned in close, and said, “You have to promise me you’ll always recognize me.”

Immediately, Donna said, “I promise.”

“Even if I look just like me,” Laura said, “or if I sound like me, or if I say I’m me, even. You have to know, okay? You can’t mistake me for anyone else. You can’t replace me with anyone else.”

“I wouldn’t,” Donna said, and she really believed that. She really believed that even if anyone in the world could look like Laura, there was only one Laura. It would be impossible to mistake her for anyone else. 

But Laura still wasn’t satisfied. Even at (maybe) twelve, she was the kind of person who shook answers out of people. “You have to know my soul. You don’t have to understand it, but you have to know it.”

Donna blinked at her. Laura had skipped Sunday school for the last three months. “I will. I will, I promise.”

And just like that, Laura broke into one of her smiles, easy as anything. She dragged Donna right back to the bed and they collapsed on it again, like nothing had happened. “Okay.”

She went back to cat’s cradle. Donna stayed staring at her, at the way her eyes focused on the strings, the way her hair fanned out in front of her face. She said, “Laura, would you recognize someone else if they looked like me? Would you know it wasn’t?”

Laura glanced up at her, only for a second, then her eyes flicked back down to the tangled yarn. “No one’s going to pretend to be you, Donna. You don’t need to worry about that.”

And that hurt her, admittedly, but it was a dumb conversation anyway and they never brought it up again so there was no point holding onto it.

\---

“No one else knows about this place but me,” Laura whispered, drawing Donna forward by both hands. She was walking backwards, and come to think of it Donna didn’t think she’d ever seen Laura trip once in her life. “And now you. So you can never, ever bring anyone else here.”

It was a waterspot, hidden behind a thin strip of woodland and a thicker patch of millpond. When Donna looked around, it looked like something out of a movie- grass, sunny gray rocks that dangle over water, and a pond about as big as a puddle, as blue as the sky. Laura giggled at the expression at her face, then let go of her hands and climbed up a rock in lithe, graceful inclines. “Isn’t it pretty? I knew you’d like it.”

Donna was slower in joining her, spending another moment looking around before climbing up the rock too and perching behind Laura. She didn’t glide the way Laura did; she scrapes her hands. “It’s beautiful. How do you know no one else knows about it?”

“Because I know all about _secrets_ ,” Laura said, mischievous, faux mysterious. Her hair was so bright in the sunlight. “You can just tell when something is secret, if you’re like me, you can smell it.”

“It must smell terrible,” Donna said, and she said so just to make Laura laugh. And she did laugh. And then she stopped.

The sun was beating down on them, hard, and in the silence the sound of water and bugs felt like it could go on forever, all the way out of Twin Peaks and into the real world. They weren’t wearing sunblock and Mrs. Palmer would have a fit when they get back. It didn’t matter much for Donna, since she freckled and didn’t burn, but she always felt guilty when Laura was all red.

Laura balanced backwards, on the hard palms of her hands, tilted her head all the way back on her neck to look at Donna instead of the sun. “I do like having secrets,” she said. “It’s an ugly thing to say, isn’t it? But I do.”

“It’s not ugly,” Donna said. “Why wouldn’t you want to keep a place like this to yourself?”

She had said the wrong thing. Laura blew some hair out of her face, impatient. “Not things like this. _Bad_ secrets. The kind of secrets you have to keep or people will hate you. I have those too. I feel like they’re like ticks, you know, under the skin… they itch, you know? But they’re mine and no one else can get to them. No one even knows they’re there. I’m not very good at keeping things locked up inside me, Donna, you know that. But I feel bad for lying to people, I really do. I feel like it’s only me who feels this way.”

“I don’t think that’s true,” Donna said. “I think a lot of people feel like that.”

For a long moment, Laura stayed suspended, just gazing at Donna backwards. Her hair fell in a delicate cascade over her shoulder, and then she lifted her neck right again. “You don’t have any secrets, Donna.”

Donna looked at the back of Laura’s head, where her hair has gone slightly crooked from leaning, then at the arch of her leg, held aloft over the water, and said, “That’s not true.”

There was silence for a moment, and Laura kept dangling her leg outward, practicing at its angles- seductive, childish, coquettish, painful. Then she said, “I hate it when you try to understand me.”

It was such a Laura thing to say. “Why?”

“Because it means you’re trying to think like me, and I don’t want you to think the way I do,” Laura said. “Besides, only people who love you try to understand you.”

Suddenly the space between them felt unbearable. Donna scooched forward, mostly with her hands, until she and Laura were sitting next to each other on the rock’s edge. She said, “Well, of course I love you, Laura.”

Even now that they were close, Laura still wouldn’t look at her. She closed her eyes. Donna persisted anyway. “I’ve always kinda figured you loved me.”

“Don’t be like that,” Laura said. Eyes still closed. 

“Like what?”

Now she opened her eyes, opened her eyes and turned her head and looked right at Donna. She wasn’t smiling, which meant this is some kind of truth of hers, some kind of urgency. “Don’t say that kind of thing like you’re begging me to love you. The boys all do that and it makes me feel sorry for them. Don’t make me sorry for you by loving you.”

Donna could have said _you feel sorry for me no matter what I do so why shouldn’t I beg_. It was what she was thinking. What she said is, “I’m not begging you for anything. I don’t want you to pretend with me, Laura.”

That made Laura smile. And it was her real smile, the smile Donna kept locked up inside herself like the ticks Laura kept under her skin. It was a smile without teeth. She said, “That’s why I like you best, Donna. I really believe you when you say things like that.” A glimmer of incisors. “Now say you’ll love me forever.”

They were only fifteen. There was no such thing as forever right then. “I love you forever.”

Laura closed her eyes again, and tilted her smile up to the sun. “Mm.”

She ended up sunburnt across her nose and under her eyelids, and Mrs. Palmer despaired of her when they both got back to the house. Donna’s shoulders were darker with freckles, but she just covered it up. 

\---

There were a lot of times, even before Laura died, where Donna felt like she had let her down. The problem with them was that no matter how much Laura told her not to change, Donna was going to grow anyway, so she kept trying to grow into someone Laura actually liked.

The time she had let Laura down the hardest, they were fifteen still. Laura had said, “Boys like it when girls kiss girls,” and they’d been on the couch of some boy Donna hadn’t known so they’d kissed, even though Donna didn’t know whether boys were watching them or not. And they’d kissed for a long time, and then when Laura had broken them apart and turned over her shoulder and kissed some other boy whose name Donna also didn’t know, Donna had gone home without kissing anyone else. Which isn’t how it was supposed to go, the way Laura saw things.

She’d breezed into Donna’s house the next day like always, coming through the front door and plopping down on the bed next to her like Donna wasn’t face down in the pillows already. “Honestly, Donna, you are such a square.”

So she’d rolled over. “So I’m a square! I’m sorry, Laura, but it doesn’t come easy to me the way it does for you, boys don’t just like me the way they like you-”

“That’s because you’re not exerting yourself,” Laura said, critically, lifting one of Donna’s limp curls off the pillow. “Honestly.”

“I don’t want to exert myself,” Donna said, petulant now, childish, not in the way that Laura can make herself childish, not sweet and vulnerable but mean and a put-off. “Laura, I can’t be like you-”

Like always, Laura’s face goes hard. “I don’t want you to be like me.”

Donna rolls her eyes, clasping her hands over her chest. “Then what do you want, Laura? You bring me to your parties but you don’t want me to be like you, you force me on boys but you don’t want me to be like you, you kiss me at parties for fun but you don’t-”

“Gracious Christ, is that what you’re hung up on?” Laura says, and just like that she’s Everyone’s Laura, Pretty without Edges Laura. “Gosh, Donna, you don’t need to get all twisted about it, a lot of girls do it. It’s _fun_.”

“I’m not twisted,” Donna says, and she sits up and balances on her hands so they’re eye to eye. Laura’s mouth stays open in a laugh, but the sound fades. “I just wish…” _you were still my friend_. “I just wish I knew what you wanted.”

Laura stares at her for so long that Donna loses her nerve, and almost her balance, and she’s about to topple back onto her pillows when Laura takes her face in both hands and kisses her again.

There’s no boys around.

When she pulls away again, Laura says, “I want you to love me forever, even after I’m dead. Does your mom have any strawberries in the fridge?”

And of course Laura wanted to die. They all knew that. But that was something else that got left unsaid.


End file.
